This year I decided to come up with a ‘baker’s dozen’ of favorite photographs that I created over the past twelve months. It was difficult to narrow it down to just 13 images, but here they are. Please do click on the images to see the larger, sharper version.

This past year I re-visited my most favorite location within Ontario – Lake Superior Provincial Park, and was blessed with one of the most beautiful sunrises I have witnessed. In February I traveled to the Port Antonio region of Jamaica where I photographed one of the most picturesque waterfalls in the Caribbean and my favorite image of my daughter Ava while she was having fun in a swing at Boston Bay. I was invited to co-write the Fractasic eGuide with good friend, colleague, and mentor Denise Ippolito, and to do ‘The Three Frosties‘ guest blog post for one of the world’s premier bird photographers Arthur Morris.

A scouting trip for planning what will become the launch of my first workshop to the tip of Lake Erie’s Long Point Peninsula (a UNESCO World Biosphere) was a success. Folks wishing to be added to the interested list for this workshop, which will likely run in late spring, should shoot me an email here.

On Christmas Eve day I spent several hours driving around to take in the beauty of the ice laden landscape and create a few fresh photographs. For these images I wanted to focus on the beauty that the ice storm created. To me it appears as though the landscape is made of crystal.

Hope you enjoy these scenes…to see the larger, sharper versions please click on each image 🙂

Winter pond after ice storm near Cookstown, Ontario

Holland River after ice storm near Bradford, Ontario

Ice laden trees lining agricultural field near Bradford, Ontario

Ice laden trees lining agricultural field near Bradford, Ontario with a panoramic crop

A wild and wicked ice storm hit southern Ontario late Saturday night / early Sunday morning and has since left a vast amount of folks without hydro for what may be 3 days. In Toronto alone there was upwards of 350,000 people without power. Never a good thing, especially in winter. Let’s hope these folks have their hydro back on soon. Fortunately, I was spared any issues at my rural home north of Toronto. We only received a small amount of freezing rain and did not lose any hydro or tree limbs.

Today, I was in Toronto and decided to capture a couple of images to illustrate the thickness of ice on the trees and on my way home captured a late evening farmscape cloaked in ice.

The last couple of morning here in south-central Ontario have been bitterly cold. This morning the outside temperature was -26 degrees Celsius, without factoring in the windchill factor. On mornings like this, my living room window gets covered with some very interesting frost patterns. While the window is in need of replacement and I dread the day when I do change the window and lose these cool effects, but for now why not have a little fun with nature’s frost paintings 🙂 In the above photo, I stood outside to catch the frost pattern and reflection of the large spruce tree that sits in my front yard. In the two images below I sat in the comfort, and warmth, of my living room to carefully compose the resulting frosty paintings.

Window Frost

Window Frost

And with such cool patterns I could not resist the temptation to run a couple of them through the Photoshop Plug-in Fractalius. To learn more about how to use this very addictive and highly creative filter please check out the eGuide FRACTASTIC, which was written by the very talented and creative Denise Ippolito and yours truly.

This past summer I created numerous frog-scape photographs using either the new AFS Nikkor 18-35mm f3.5-4.5G ED Lens or the Sigma f2.8 EX DG 15mm Fish-eye Lens. Nikon’s new 18-35mm lens allows a close focusing of 12 inches while the Sigma Fish-eye focuses down to 5.9 inches, which is almost a full 4 inches closer than that of Nikon’s 16mm fish-eye lens (being able to focus closer with the Sigma lens is a huge advantage). The main difference between using the fish-eye lens versus using the wide angle zoom for frog-scapes is that the fish-eye lens will distort the horizon line giving it a rounded appearance, while the wide angle zoom will keep the horizons straight. I like both perspective equally so I will often change lenses to create two variations, especially when the subjects are being co-operative.

As you scroll through my favorite frog-scapes created last summer at the family cottage on Horseshoe Lake near Parry Sound, Ontario, do note the captions that indicate which lens was used to create each of the images.

Please click on each image to see the larger, sharper versions and please take a moment to let me know which ones are your favorites.

Here are a few recently optimized images from my photo excursions in September and October that I wanted to share with folks. I have been swamped lately with various projects as well as getting caught up on a large backlog of image files sitting on my hard-drives…never seems to be enough time and the backlog keeps getting bigger. Hope you like this collection of recently edited photographs.